Just like a library is a collection of books
produced by independent authors, the Internet is a collection of web sites
produced by independent authors. Libraries are organized by librarians following
accepted standards. Although the internet is not organized like a library, there
are a numerous indexes for the parts of the Internet.
Yahoo.com is a good
example of a directory of the Internet.
Yahoo.com has organized the internet
into a hierarchy of categories organizing everything. Under the categories
Arts > Humanities > History they have Genealogy. Here there are dozens of
categories organizing hundreds of links to genealogy web sites.

Search
Engines

Although Internet categorization is useful, search engines are ideal for finding
keywords such as surnames and place names. Search engines like
Google.com, store and
index the entire content of the Internet. This amazing achievement allows you to
search for content of web pages rather than depend on someone to categorize web
pages appropriately. Although search engines are amazing, they do have
limitations. All search engines index regular web pages but they require that
the sites be either registered or linked from another indexed site. In reality,
this is not much of a limitation and most of the important information is
indexed by search engines.

How can Google help in family history?

Search
engines like Google are very good at finding obscure or hidden web pages. Family tradition says that my ancestors came
from Mountshannon Ireland. I have read that the town of Mountshannon was founded by George Tandy. A Google search with
keywords Mountshannon Tandy lists 12 pages of interest. The
first two pages
have interesting historical descriptions of Mountshannon, but there is another
that is even better. There is a page that describes a book published by the East
Clare Heritage Company which is rather obscure but of great interest to me. How
else could I discover and acquire an obscure book like this? The Google search provided an immediate way to find
this treasure.

There are a number of articles written about
Google tricks, but all of the tricks can be achieved by simply
going to the Google Advanced Search option. Google also has the ability
to search through newsgroups from its Groups page and search for pictures from
its Images page. The one trick that you can't do from the Advanced
Search, is to bring a web page back from the dead. When you do a
normal Google search, you will notice that the resulting links include another
link called Cached. If you click on this link, you get a copy of the web
page that is stored on the Google server instead of the real web page. If the
real web page is dead, i.e. removed or lost, you may be able to retrieve it from
the Google cache. To do this, type the web page URL address in the Google query
box and preceed it with "cache:". For example, if you want the cached version of
www.rootsweb.com then type in cache:www.rootsweb.com.

Why did they come to America?

A common question for many American families is
"Why did our ancestors leave their ancestral home to come to America?" Tradition
in my wife's family said that the family worked for an Irish Bishop before they
came to Canada. Eventually, I found a relative who had a letter of introduction
written by their Irish Church on June 22, 1850 which indicated that they had
worked for the Bishop of Clogher. Who was this Bishop of Clogher? A Google
search for '"Bishop of Clogher" 1850' found the following.

Not only have I learned that the Bishop's son
died that same year, but now I also know that the Bishop's name is Robert
Ponsonby Tottenham. A Google search of his name finds that the Bishop died 26
April 1850. I now know the sequence of events were that the Bishop died and his
workers from his estate came to Canada. Their employer died so the family left
Ireland.

Surprisingly the Bishop's estate was in the
Diocese of Ferns in the south but Clogher was far away in the north. Why would
the Bishop of Clogher has an estate in the Diocese of Ferns? Further probing
into the Bishop's history on the Internet showed that prior to Clogher, he was
the Bishop of Ferns. Question Answered!